Tag Archives: Robert Pattinson

The Batman

The Batman is another fresh start for a DC superhero. This time around, Robert Pattinson dons the mask, taking the torch from Ben Affleck, who was originally set to star in and direct this movie until he stepped aside in 2017 as director. Eventually, after Matt Reeves took over as director, after Pattinson got COVID-19 while filming, and after getting pushed from its original release date like every other movie in the past two years, The Batman finally arrived in theatres in March 2022 and started streaming on HBO Max and Crave this week.

Pattinson’s (The) Batman is in year two of his crime-fighting experiment, a relatively young man who is still learning his trade alongside Jeffrey Wright’s Lieutenant Gordon. Batman is brought in by Gordon to help investigate the murder of Gotham’s mayor by the Riddler (Paul Dano), and quickly figures out that the mayor is just the first name of many on the killer’s list. The list’s last name is an unknown informant, and Batman, as he does, tries to solve the puzzle of the informant’s identity so he can save the city and stop the Riddler’s plan.

To help in his quest, Batman recruits Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), who gives him access to Gotham’s seedy underbelly, located in a nightclub run by the Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell) and regularly attended by mobster Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Selina fights with and against Batman as the situation requires and proves herself to be both a worthy Catwoman and the best sidekick that any live-action Batman movie has had so far.

The Batman also features a great Batmobile which fits Gotham’s aesthetic about as well as anything that Batman’s ever driven, proving its worth in an excellent chase across Gotham’s freeways. Despite the movie’s almost three hour runtime, none of Batman’s other vehicles made the cut this time, which is almost certainly for the best. There is a clear inverse relationship between the quality of any given Batman movie and the number of vehicles Batman uses.

Given The Batman’s tortured history, I wondered whether it would have been better for Warner Bros. to have scrapped it along with so many other DCEU titles that never made it to theatres. But this film quickly won me over. Pattinson is great as Batman and also surprisingly good as emo Bruce Wayne, Kravitz is a compelling partner and love interest, and Reeves gives us a Gotham that is dark, rainy and gritty most of the time, but splashed with just enough colour and familiar elements to feel like it could be full of real people. It’s a place I would like to visit again, and there are enough villains left standing at the end of The Batman to support three or four more entries in this series before the next inevitable reboot.

The Devil All The Time

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God may take smoke breaks but the devil sure doesn’t. Little Arvin Russell (Michael Banks Repeta) is a boy living with his parents in Knockemstiff, Ohio in the 1950s – about as rural as it gets, a place where everyone is someone else’s relation but alarmingly that doesn’t seem to stop them from coupling up. The Russells mostly keep to themselves. Mom Charlotte (Haley Bennett) was a waitress when she caught Willard’s eye. Willard (Bill Skarsgård) has recently returned from war, and when the urge to pray hits, he takes it seriously, building a “prayer log” in the backyard where he often drags son Arvin and compels him not only to pray, but to pray well, which means fervently, and loudly. Their prayers don’t work. Charlotte dies. Willard soon follows. A local police officer (Sebastian Stan) comforts Arvin and makes sure he gets to his grandmother over in equally rural West Virginia. There he grows up with a stepsister, Lenora, who hadn’t been orphaned so much as abandoned by mom Helen (Mia Wasikowska) and dad Roy (Harry Melling). Eventually Arvin (now played by Tom Holland) and Lenora (Eliza Scanlen) grow up, and though Arvin remains a humble and peaceable young man, a solar system worth of sinister characters is orbiting him, and he’s on a collision course with all of them.

This film has a deep cast. I haven’t yet mentioned Robert Pattinson, Riley Keough, or Jason Clarke, some of whom don’t appear until 45 minutes or more into the film, but all them are leaving quite an impression. Holland is the real stand-out though, and well he should be, since he is the sun and the others are mere planets. Nearly all of them have two things in common: religion, and violence. There will be lots of both.

It helps to remember that the title is The Devil All The Time. Not part time. Not even full time. ALL OF THE TIME. He’s relentless. Arvin, though, doesn’t care much for religion. He’s had a bad experience with it, and you can hardly blame him. So he’s establishing his morality based on other concepts, on his own internal sense of right and wrong, one that snakes in and out of every last one of these characters, and eventually it leads him back to the town where he was born, and to the officer who once led him away from a crime scene. No matter how far you go, you always end up right back where you started.

Director Antonio Campos indulges his cast, giving them ample time and space to breathe within scenes, and who can blame him when everyone is doing such excellent, and often against-type work. The movie is bleak, and violent. It is most definitely not an action movie. The violence isn’t stylized, it isn’t fun, it isn’t entertaining. It makes you cringe, and coupled with religion, makes you think.

The film is gritty, atmospheric, its inky fingers slowly unfurling themselves, choking the characters on their own nefarious intentions, sending tendrils of shiver down your spine as the tension increases. It is not a perfect film, nor an even one. The tone suffers, and just plain cannot be sustained during the film’s bloated run-time. But I enjoyed it, overall, enjoyed the riveting performances and the interesting take on narration, performed by the book’s author, Donald Ray Pollock. It’s got some disturbing imagery and some graphic violence too, but when the film is over, it’s the issues you’ll still be thinking about, trying to tease out what it all means.

Tenet

16 Replies

No worries, no spoilers.

I’m an insomniac, emphasis on the niac. As in: not sleeping turns you into a complete and utter maniac. As in: not many good words end in niac. Egomaniac. Pyromaniac. Kleptomaniac. Megalomaniac, for maniacs with positive self regard. But while the word insomniac focuses on that which I do not have (ie, sleep), it fails to account for the many things I’ve gained, (ie, time). Time to stew on thoughts and do deep dives probing insecurities and trying new anxieties on for size, sure, of course, but also time to read. There is a special kind of reading that takes place in the middle of the night, when everyone else is sleeping. Once you’ve reached at least the 36th hour of nonstop awakeness, your brain unveils a secret capacity, a wormhole of clarity, almost, wherein all things are possible. I do read a fair amount of trash, but every now and again I like to throw in a hefty tome or two, just in case I’m secretly a genius with untapped potential, should I ever come across it. And it was on one such night, June 6, 2018 in fact, in a feverish sleepless state, that I was reading a book about string theory and understanding it. By morning, the ghost of string theory was still with me, and as long as I didn’t attempt to look at it straight in the face, it was there, a light dusting of dew on my brain that I worried would evaporate with the sun. Or rather, with sleep. Anyway, I am to this day not a world-renowned particle physicist, so it wasn’t permanent or complete enlightenment. But this wasn’t the first time I’d experienced such insight. In March of 2003, I was making my way through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Ugh. That Joyce is a straight up dick. Finnegans Wake is the single most obtuse piece of literature to ever darken the Dewey decimal system. If you hate readers so much, why on earth did you become a writer? Idioglossia my ass, this man’s just straight up making shit up as he goes along all stream of consciousness like he’s never met a piece of punctuation he didn’t want to flick to the ground and grind it like it’s the stub of a cigarette and we’re the ones getting smoked. But for a minute there, a glorious minute, I was getting it. I was getting it! I was lost in the rhythm of Joyce’s unique syntax, I was beyond comprehension, I was feeling the meaning, and the subtext. I was absorbing it into my skin like Joyce and his opaque one-hundred-letter-words were nothing but aloe.

This might feel like kind of a digression, but first let me remind you that in order to digress, you have to have first introduced the topic from which to digress, and I haven’t done that, so consider the above paragraph bonus content. Now I will tell you that I am writing a review of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, the saviour of the summer blockbuster. Except it’s now been released at the very end of August, and even as desperate as people are for a good movie and a return to some normalcy, Tenet is not some trashy beach read, accessible and easily digested. It is most definitely a Finnegans Wake, and it’s unlikely to save cinema no matter what the hype may have you believe.

After a brush with insomnia over the weekend, I got some medically-induced sleep earlier this week and am feeling fresh of brain and body. But Christopher Nolan knows how to hypnotize his audience. We feel, if not incapacitated, then intoxicated. Nolan builds the kinds of worlds we might encounter in dreams. Inception taught us to challenge everything. Interstellar taught us to think outside the box. Tenet merely kicks us in the teeth.

The good thing about not understanding a movie is that you can’t possibly spoil it. And yes, yes there were times when I thought I was getting it. I was a smug little shit, untangling the plot like it’s a delicate, thoroughly knotted rose gold pendant that I’m desperate to dangle above my cleavage at dinner, the diamond shining just a little brighter for having worked for it. But no. No.

John David Washington is simply The Protagonist, an operative with a global assignment to stop a renegade Russian oligarch from destroying the world. To do so, he’ll have to master time inversion because sometimes the only way out is through.

Parallel universes are for pussies. Christopher Nolan’s played with time and space before. This time he’s fucking with it, and with us.

In the deepest, deepest layers of Inception, it was difficult to judge just how many layers down we’d gone, and therefore it was easy to lose track of which reality was actual reality. When Leo spins that top and the screen goes black before we know whether it will topple over, that’s basic math. Like, ultra basic. Not even addition, just straight counting. Tenet is like abstract algebra, necessitating the contemplation of infinite dimensions. Plus number theory, the properties of and relationships between integers and integer-valued functions. Nolan may be one heck of a professor and Tenet the most sublime power point presentation, but this shit is hard and for most of us, a little out of reach. Way too many times during the film I could smell the smoke coming from my brain as it attempted to calculate and process too many things at once. I am way too linear a thinker to feel comfortable when Tenet hits its stride, which is frustrating because those are objectively the very most interesting bits!

You know those pricks who back into a parking spot just because they can? Like it was totally unnecessary so they’re basically just showing off? Nolan is that prick. Tenet is his oversized pickup truck. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS HARD! But since it is, a few tricks:

Pay attention to everything. Because everything is something, nothing is nothing, the more nothing it seems, the more something it is.
You’re going to want to watch it again. Even if you hate the movie and how it makes you feel (cough*inadequate*cough), you’ll want to see it again. You need to watch it with the knowledge you can only gain by watching it hopelessly and helplessly the first time. And you’re definitely going to want to discuss it.
The title is a clue.
The movie poster is a clue.
Even my goddamned digression is an accidental clue.
Everything is important, okay? And it’s all happening all the time, and especially when it’s not. So don’t let your guard down.

The King

14 Replies

In the early 15th century, Timothee Chalamet had a mushroom cut. One of my sisters had a mushroom cut. This was in the late 20th century of course. She was 5 or 6 at the time. I believe that haircut haunts her to this day but the truth is, it was adorable. All the way, fully 100% adorable and I am exceedingly confident each and every one of you would agree. I would post a picture just to prove it if I thought for a second I’d live to hit publish another day.

Anyyyyyway. Hal (Chalamet) is a young cad about town. Technically he’s the prince of England, but like anyone with a modicum of sanity, he doesn’t think being King sounds like much fun and so he plans to reject the crown. But then his daddy dies and so does his brother and shit just basically conspires against him and boom bang bing, he’s King Henry V. Little King Henry is determined to distinguish himself from his father, largely thought to have brought a lot of trouble to his kingdom, yet he rather quickly ends up at war with France.

I’ve gone and said quickly but Robert Pattinson, who plays the Dauphin of France, does not appear on screen for about 1 hour and 14 minutes. I wasn’t counting, I swear. You’ll know him by his rousing “Big balls, small cock” speech. Yeah, they left that one out of history books for some reason.

Timothee Chalamet puts forth a very impressive performance, calling on the entire range of human emotion, which is likely both historically inaccurate and behaviour unbecoming of a monarch. The point is, he’s very good. I’m about to say he’s even the only good thing about the movie. You’ll disagree of course, feel free to do so, but I thought it was a real chore. Dark and dank – what, you think a movie can’t be dank? You’re calling me out on this? Determined to humiliate me even though I’m just trying to say this movie is damp and smells vaguely of mildew? Fine – dark and disagreeable, The King is not a pleasant experience. It’s also quite boring. One time a couple of underdeveloped princes wrestle, but they quickly got out of breath, mostly because they were each wearing like 60 lbs of armour, which kind of makes their attempt to kill each other seem less than genuine. Anyway, I’m just saying it would have been better had they been naked.

The King reminded me a lot of Outlaw King, only without all the horse murder. Haha, jkjkjk, horses definitely die. Netflix clearly believes we’ll only start taking them seriously if they make historical, horse murdery crap that nobody actually wants to watch. Give me another season of Nailed It! over this shite any day.

TIFF19: The Lighthouse

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Two men are dropped off on a rock in the middle of the ocean, left alone to tend the lighthouse. The men, let’s call them Wick and Winslow, though they mostly go by “Sir” and “lad”, are strangers about to get extremely cozy during the four weeks of their isolation.

Winslow (Robert Pattinson) is a young guy, a bit of a drifter, here to make some serious money and go home. Wick (Willem Dafoe) is gruff yet poetic, exacting yet frustrated by Winslow’s rule-abiding nature. The two rub each other wrong right from the start, and the thing about having absolutely nothing but each other’s company is that you’ll either become best friends or the worst of enemies. lighthouse

The weeks pass slowly, marked by back-breaking work. There’s wanking and drinking and farting, but eventually their time is up. They’ve made it! Except that’s really just where the story starts.

A storm blows in, which means no boat can come for them. They’ve been stranded, but for how long? Days? Weeks? Time becomes meaningless, reality blurred. We’re witnessing a descent into madness, but the question is: whose? Winslow’s? Wick’s? Our own?

Shot in stark black and white, with an aching cinematography and an arresting sound design, Robert Eggers (director of the Witch) returns with a dizzying, disorienting film about madness.

The candlelight serves perfectly to illuminate Dafoe’s lined face, his fevered eyes leaving us to wonder whether he’s a psychopath or just a drunk. Dafoe and Pattinson spar thrillingly on screen, each pushed by the other to unravel even further. It’s magnetic even if it’s not always easy to watch.

The Lighthouse is full of omens and mythic imagery awaiting decoding. This film doesn’t have the same sense of unending, unbearable dread that the Witch did, but it will surprise and confound you in new and unique ways, daring you to look away.

TIFF18: High Life

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The interesting thing about High Life is the negative space – it’s all the stuff it cleverly carves out. At some point in the future, Earth is sending young, death-row convicts to outer space to “serve science” by allowing their bodies to be experimented upon. What kind of Earth is this? We never see it. What kind of crimes are we talking about? We’re never told.

Monte (Robert Pattinson) is one such prisoner. The film’s first scene shows him alone on a space craft save for a baby – his daughter? Cut to: an undisclosed time before, when he is just one of many prisoners under the scrutiny of Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche). Ostensibly they’re gathering information on black holes, but there’s also fertility experimentation being done – and what we know and they don’t is they’re never coming back from this mission. They were never meant to.

The male prisoners masturbate alone in a ‘fuck room’ and Dr. Dibs then fertilizes the female prisoners, which makes for near-constant space miscarriages. She herself enjoys a solitary go at the fuck room, riding a contraption reminiscent of Burn After Reading’s dildo chair. She enjoys a little solo S&M, her white skin framed by the black walls, the room feeling as dark and blank as the space outside, though rarely glimpsed, must also be.

There’s a lot of silence in space; so too in Claire Denis’s High Life. It’s disorienting and confusing and filled me with dread. In contrast to Interstellar or Gravity or The Martian, High Life has very little in the way of special effects, and actually doesn’t bother much with what’s outside the walls of their ship. If you’re a fan of Claire Denis, don’t worry, she’s as inaccessible as ever – bleak, subversive, full of fleeting, nightmarish impressions.

There’s a lot of ritual in this movie but no purity – Claire Denis puts bodies through hell. Body horror? Sort of. A horrific degradation of bodies. Of consent. Of dignity. In Monte we find a different kind of prisoner, and a stubborn will to persist. There’s a special kind of stress, and madness, to be found in the voids but always Denis refers back to what these 9 represent: humanity? What does their treatment mean for the humans back on Earth, and how does it feel to be utterly forgotten and abandoned by society?

Good Time

19 Replies

It’s times like this when I must truly sit and reflect on what a movie review really is. It’s an opinion. Truly, it is only an opinion. Some people’s opinions are informed by education or experience, and other people are just very good at being opinionated. Personally, I haven’t been to film school. I’m curious and fascinated by movies, which has motivated me to look into the behind-the-scenes stuff that contributes to what makes a movie great as opposed to good. But I’m also just a nerd when it comes to story-telling in general. Before I reviewed movies, I reviewed books (for Random House). And I write. Obviously. Constantly. I have an instinctive idea of what makes a story good and compelling and worthy. But when it comes to judging whether that story’s been told effectively on the screen, well, it’s all subjective.

We started Assholes Watching Movies as a group of friends who frequently went to movies together and left the movie arguing about it. It was a passion of ours to dissect a movie and find out which pieces were working and which weren’t, and which ones stuck with us, or became part of our culture. Over the months and years it has dwindled to just Sean and I, still duking it out, still good-naturedly disagreeing with each about which movie is worth our time, and yours. Since the world doesn’t necessarily need yet another review of the movie Keanu, we try to inject our reviews with a little piece of ourselves – in this case, a diatribe against cat ownership and a shameless excuse to post pictures of our far superior dogs. Actually that’s true of at least 10% of the reviews on this site.

The great thing about being part of a blogging community is that we get to read the words of others, and do so on an extremely regular basis. So while I hadn’t yet seen Good Time, I already knew it was a good time. Reviewers that I know and respect had told me so. Was I prepared to love it? Heck yes. Did I? Oh, no, no I did not.

But I don’t want to discourage anyone from checking it out, because I think little movies like this deserve to be seen, to be given a chance. And I love films that take risks, even if for me, this one didn’t pan out. It’s about a stupid criminal named Constantine (Robert Pattinson) who botches a bank robbery and lets his brother get caught by the cops. In a period of just 24 hours, he’s in a real frenzy to set his brother free. Of course his plans derail and he’s increasingly desperate and he takes us on a pretty crazy tour of society’s gritty underbelly, which is well-shot and occasionally looks breath-takingly cool. See, even as I write this, it sounds like I loved it. Except the truth is I never engaged and was really kind of bored. Sean and I started this more than a week ago and I had to ask him to pause it because I just wasn’t happy spending my time with it. I came back to it only reluctantly, and only because I can never let things go.

So yeah, this movie is not for me, but maybe it is for you. And if you’d like to hear more, here are some of the excellent, persuasive reviews I’ve read and enjoyed on the film. Feel free to add yours in the comments!

Liam says “A chilling performance from Robert Pattinson, coupled with edgy crime-drama, and we’ve got ourselves a damn good film.”

The Film Blog writes “This is genre cinema that puts a beating heart at the centre of its twisty, metropolitan plot, before repeatedly ripping it out to jaw-dropping effect. Fantastic.”

Anna says “Good Time is a delight.”

Jade writes “Promising less than its namesake, Good Time presents an unflinching portrait of crime, propelled by misguided familial love.”

Keith calls it “a thrill ride from beginning to end.”

Joel notes a “gripping atmosphere created by the well-crafted gritty thriller script.”

812 Film Reviews calls it “white arrogance on overdrive” and this may be the review you should read above all because while I hadn’t formulated the thought myself, it resonated real hard.

SXSW: Damsel

8 Replies

This movie lit the Internet critics on fire when it premiered at Sundance, so it was an easy add to our crowded list here at SXSW. Brothers David Zellner and Nathan Zellner were the writers-directors behind the TIFF hit Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter a few years back so of course people were aflame to see what they’d come up with next.

In Damsel, they give us a beautiful if vaguely set Western. Sam (Robert Pattinson) has just arrived in a crummy unnamed town – the kind of town that’ll hang you for skull duggery, skull thuggery, and/or skull buggery, but they’ll yodel for you first. Bathing is rare and tooth brushing is evidently unheard of, which are unfortunate habits in a MV5BYjg2N2M2NjUtNWNjOS00MWMyLTgyOTctM2IwOTE3ZjVhMzNlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTU5Mzk0NjE@._V1_ people so fond of social gang-bangs. Sam, who very much looks the part of a gentleman, and who has arrived with “the Farrah Fawcett of miniature horses”, a lovely girl named Butterscotch, traipses through town in search of the forever-inebriated parson, whom he has engaged and will pay generously for his services. He’s here to marry his “true pure love” Penelope (Mia Wasikowska), and they’ve only got to battle the wilderness, stave off predators, rescue her from “scum-loving evil” and survive anything from an interrupted morning wank to a bent-gun fight in order to make his intended his wife.

The Zellner brothers aren’t too concerned about geographic or temporal accuracy, and nor should you be. Instead they’ve cobbled together the very best bits from every dusty corner of the genre and assembled them into a whole that is surprising and new. The score is amazing and cinematographer Adam Stone does some impressive work making Utah bend to his will. The film is more colourful and more lively than other westerns, and if ever there was a film begging us to forget what we know of the genre and start from glorious, scrubby scratch, this is it. But this is not just a film to keep you guessing, it also keeps you giggling, which it does in defiance of the genre. I wouldn’t call it absurd, exactly, but it’s a movie that’s meant to be enjoyed, and I think you’d have to be a pretty dedicated stick in the mud not to get a whole lot of enjoyment out of this one.

The Lost City of Z

16 Replies

Percy Fawcett is a hard-working man but promotion eludes him due to his “unfortunate choice of ancestors.” This provides the desperate motivation in him agreeing on a mapping “adventure” deep in the Amazonian jungle. If disease doesn’t kill him, the hostile “savages” are likely to, but to restore his family name and support his family, off he goes…never to return.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) was a real British explorer who did get sent to the Amazon. While surveying there he believed he found a previously unknown, unfathomed advanced civilization. Back home he is ridiculed by his peers, but he’s obsessed, not just with a potentially huge discovery, but with proving himself. His fire is lit, his wife (Sienna Miller) supports him and his aide de camp (Robert Pattinson) enables him until one day he just disappears into the jungle.

Shooting a movie in an honest to blog jungle is difficult and uncomfortable. Director James Gray asked Francis Ford Coppola (who did the same for Apocalypse Now) for advice, and he was told “Don’t go”, which, incidentally, is the same thing Roger Corman told Coppola. Nobody listens, but it’s probably solid advice. If you do disregard it and trek to the steamiest of locations, make sure you don’t plan to film digitally. Gray was shooting 35mm thankfully, as the humidity shut down all the laptops and would have done the same to digital cameras. The actors and crew withstood and great deal of hardship – was it worth it?

The Lost City of Z (it’s pronounced Zed, you filthy Americans) has a meandering pace that reminds me of the epic adventure movies of 50 years ago or more. I can’t justify its runtime (141 minutes!) and I know exactly what I would have left on the cutting room floor, but I do love lots about the movie. I love the complexity that Hunnam brings to the role. I love the subtlety and the refusal to exploit that Gray insists upon. I love the authenticity of the script, the honest portrayal of sacrifice, the bold ambition of the story. There aren’t exactly a lot of surprises to be had. It’s about finding oneself while literally losing oneself. But there’s a lot to enjoy along the way. The jungle itself plays a stunning role; tip of the old safari hat to cinematographer Darius Khondji who captured things no CGI could hope to emulate.